Bulwark Takes - Trump Suggests CANCELING 2026 Elections

Episode Date: January 16, 2026

JVL and Andrew Egger give their takes on Donald Trump repeatedly floating the idea of canceling elections and why calling it a "joke" is dangerously naive. From past attempts to overturn results to testing how far his party will follow him, they break down why this isn’t just trolling.

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If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connix Ontario at 1866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Hello, everyone. It's JVL here with my bulwark colleague, Andrew Eger, and Donald Trump, Donald Trump, our president, sat down with the good folks at Reuters, and they published today that he said something very interesting. He said that when you think of it, we shouldn't even have an election. He said referring to the elections, which will be taking place all across America this November, less than a year from now. Andrew, is this a big deal?

Well, it's funny you should put it that way because this is one of these things that Donald Trump does periodically, right? Where he's like, hey, wouldn't it be crazy if I just were a dictator? Or wouldn't it be crazy if I just canceled the elections? Or wouldn't it be crazy if I just like invaded Greenland militarily? Wouldn't that be just nuts?

And a lot of people say, well, yeah, actually, that would be really, really nuts if you did that. And then, you know, his whole peanut gallery immediately is like, ha ha, gotcha again, you know, circles the wagons like, that's exactly why he said it in the first place to get a rise out of you, you know, triggering, hand-wringing liberals. Yeah, exactly, triggered you, gotcha. And at the same time, there's this whole undercurrent where all the stuff that he's supposedly joking about,

he's kind of doing a lot of that stuff all along, right? He actually is like creating these giant geopolitical waves with regard to Greenland. He actually has in the past tried to steal a presidential election and is, in fact, like, giving his underling's directives to do all sorts of interesting work ahead of this upcoming one. So, I mean, it's like, I don't know, when you, I'm curious, because you, JVL, like, your whole thing is sort of like trying to ferret out which of these things are like real plausibilities and which of them are sort of smoke and mirrors. Like when you hear something like this from the president, do you kind of like roll your eyes and say, there he goes again, the big dummy, you know, with like doing little bits for his hooting base? Or do you react in a different way? No, I mean, I react in a different way, which is that he is. So we should say before I answer this that Carolyn Leavitt was asked about this today.

And her response, well, I didn't see it, but you did. Andrew, what was her response? It was very straightforward. President was joking. It was a big joke. Ha-ha. My question is, President Trump has talked twice in recent days, once in the Kennedy Center, and then to Reuters again last night, about canceling the election.

Why is he talking about this? I believe you're referring to the president's interview at Reuters last night. I was in that interview. It was a closed-door interview. Obviously, there was not audio or video. The president was simply joking. He was saying, we're doing such a great job. We're doing everything the American people thought.

Maybe we should just keep rolling. But he was speaking facetiously. You know, that's all. Just joking. I don't think he is serious in the sense of he is suggesting to the reporter from Reuters right there that he is toying with the idea of canceling the midterm elections. So I don't think that is serious and that's what he's doing. I do think he is serious in that in his bones fundamentally, he doesn't believe we should have

elections. He views them as at worst threats and as at best annoyances, not as celebrations of democracy, in that he has spent quite a lot of time thinking about, are there ways I can get around elections? He's floated this before. I remember he had a meeting with Vladimir Zelenskyy where he was like, you know, it's interesting. They're, you know, in Ukraine, they can't have elections when they're at war. So, you know, if three and a half years from now, we're at war, maybe we can't have elections in America, right? Of course, the Ukrainian constitution is written that way for a very specific reason, because Russia is next to them.

We are not blah, blah, blah. He said the same thing about Venezuela as well, by the way. I mean, Venezuela's own laws stipulate that, that, you know, if for some reason the government is decapitated and the president can no longer serve, you need to have a new election within 30 days. Trump has said, well, of course we're not going to do that. That'd be crazy. Like, we're going to just have, we're just going to continue with this U.S. puppet regime

in the form of Maduro's form. former vice president. So yes, I get where you're coming from. And I also get where you're coming from in terms of, I mean, the context in which he said this in the, in the Reuters interview, uh, was very interesting because he's sort of bemoaning the sort of like historical reality that usually a sitting president loses the midterms, right? I mean, like this is, this is a thing we're hearing a lot from Republicans these days because, uh, uh, do not only to those historical realities, but also many other uncomfortable facts on the ground. It really does look like Republicans are, are gearing up for like a real shalacking this November. And so,

So he's talking about this, and he's saying it's like almost unfair. It's almost like this cosmic injustice, given how much we're getting done, that this historical trend is likely to befall us. And that's when he says, you know, like, it's not that this is just a quirk of sort of like thermostatic U.S. politics and, you know, American voters like to throw the bums out. It's like he sees it as like this strange and unfair rule of the game that he's been thrust to do that he's going to have to have his people go to the ballot box. Yeah.

And I, the other thing is, so people talk about, there's like a sociological idea of context collapse, right? Where where people suddenly, you know, have a total inability to understand the context in which a thing is said or posted. This is most often used when sociologists talk about social media and the evils of social media. There is like a context collapse aspect to this, which is that if Barack Obama or Joe Biden or George W. Bush, or Bill Clinton or George H.W. Bush or Ronald Reagan or Jimmy Carter. Just go back. Like, you know, any, any president of our lifetimes had said something like this, you could put it in the broad context of their administration and say, okay, does this look like a joke or does it comport with some very dangerous things we're seeing? The president this morning talked about, you know, invoking the Insurrection Act in Minnesota. We, he has sent. thousands of masked, totally unaccountable federal agents into Minnesota. They are going to door to door in Minneapolis.

They killed a woman last week. The president and his administration maintained that this agent won't even be investigated and that, of course, they were happy to do it. He did, did you notice, this was, I wrote about this today. We did the first sale of Venezuelan oil. Did you see that, Andrew? So we sold $500 million worth of Venezuelan oil, and the president put those proceeds into an account in Qatar. Cutter, not the U.S. Treasury in Qatar.

Why did he do this? Because he doesn't want it to go to a place where Congress can oversee the funds. And he wants to place those funds outside of the boundaries of the law, because there are a whole bunch of creditors lined up to recoup claims and debts that Venezuela owes. So he wants his own funding stream totally independent of the Congress. That is kind of a king like thing. Right. Also, he did attempt a coup. He did attempt a coup once.

So this is why, again, it is one thing that's like, ah, he's just joking. But you do have to understand that everything he's done has been, you know, in service of making himself a totally unaccountable autocrat. He's trying to be a dictator. Yeah. The thing that is really striking to me at kind of like an anthropological level in all of this is if you think back to like when Trump was first arriving on the scene, he was coming up right around the same time that people were hearing for the first time about the alt right and like the online radical right and all these sorts of things. And these people and the ways in which they sort of approached the world and moved through politics were so alien. to a lot of us. And it was basically like, it's so strange the way that these guys live in this,

in this state of like permanent half irony, right? Where they, where, you know, they're, they're constantly hatching these little, these little injokes and memes that are, that are sort of snuggling up against white nationalist stuff or, or trafficking in open neo-Nazi and white nationalist stuff or, or like creating new symbols like Pepe the Frog that, or, that, or, or, or the okay sign being white power and basically saying, like, you know, we're going to get people to associate these things with white nationalism, and then we're going to do them a lot, and then we're going to make fun of them for calling us white nationalists, right?

It was like this bit. But, like, you live in that bit for years and years and years where, like, the only thing that really matters to you is, like, this sense of, like, permanent transgression and the kicks you get out of it. And suddenly you are, like, just find yourself actually not ironically at all, inhabiting all of these things that you supposedly were only putting on to make this sort of like meta-bankshot point about like liberal sensibilities and and and you know over over-sensuriousness and things like that before. And I, the degree to which that kind of mode of politics has just

completely swallowed like the entire political right because of the person, because of the person of Donald Trump and the fact that, and the fact that's the only way to kind of process him and not like completely lose your sanity. if you are on the right today. I mean, it's, it really is remarkable. That is, it's not just like some bozos on the internet doing memes. It's the president of the United States sitting in the Oval Office and being like, wouldn't it be nutty if I were to cancel the election like I have actually tried to do in

the past? And everyone's like, is he kidding? Is he not? We don't really know. But we do know that you are dumb for caring is kind of the posture. So I don't know. It's all very bleak. Andrew, it's not even just that there are bozos on the internet.

It's that a lot of those bozos on the internet now, work for the United States government. Right. So I have now written three times this week about, like, and I just keep writing pieces that are like, hey, there's this weird, like, not even really crypto-Nazi, but like kind of Nazi thing coming out of parts of the federal government. Isn't that a problem? And the first one was somebody had forwarded me a picture from October of a portrait of

Greg Bovino that had been shot for a photo shoot for CNN. And when she shows up with this top coat that I am sorry is just, my first thought was like, oh, he looks like Dugie Houser at the end of Starship Troopers, right? Which is, which is then, you know, was modeled on the Nazis. And it is, it just looks like you go boss, right? It was straight out of the SS. And then we had, they posted lyrics or no, they titled something, a song that is beloved by white nationalists. And then last night or yesterday, they posted this very bizarre thing.

It's like a little picture of sled dogs in Greenland. And, you know, one way is America. The other way is China and Russia. And the caption is, which way Greenland man? And there's no what you're like looking at this. And unless you follow neo-Nazis and you know, you would look at that and be like, wait, what is? That's a weird formulation. Who would say that?

The reason is because somebody who is there has. read the book, which way Western man, which is a neo-Nazi tract, in which, you know, this was written in 1978 by this white supremacist who posited that the Jews control everything, and Hitler was right, and it was a whole plot against white people. Somebody who knows that is running the White House Twitter feed. And not only that, but like thinks it's super cool to go kidding on the square about it? I mean, again, these are the people

who are going to run the Republican Party for the next decade because they are not just guys in their basements. They have government jobs. They're part of the party apparatus now. The one that you alluded to a minute ago, and this was the most striking one for me, was when I think the quote is

we'll have our home again, right? Which is not a very common way of phrasing anything, right? These things are all weirdly phrased. Yeah, it's sort of like where we go when we go all, where it's not like nobody accidentally stumbles across the phrase, we'll have our home again. So what is we'll have our home again? It is explicitly a lyric from a song about being sort of like outnumbered by foreigners

in your own country who you are going to expel that is exclusively beloved. By blood or sweat. Right. Yeah. And look, like this has been like a running theme all through this administration, you know, going all the way back to, you know, Elon Musk and did he do a Heil Hitler stuff and things like. And I personally, I have kind of dug in my heels a little bit about this. I sometimes have thought to myself that this stuff is not great for people to get hung up on because why would we go digging for like, you know, plausibly evil, like symbology and stuff when the stuff that's just happening out there in the open is so evil and shouldn't we be focusing on that?

But recently, I mean, it has been so over the top that I can't even like construct that argument for myself anymore. I mean, like, it's just, they're just, like, I have seen people make this, this point online, and it's also a point that has occurred to me, myself. You almost can't talk about these things with people who aren't paying attention to them because they are so ludicrous. They're so grotesque. It's just nuts that any of this stuff is happening. Like, just to narrate it. The Department of Labor published a tweet with one homeland, one people, one heritage. Remember who you are American.

Like, I'm sorry. that worked better in the original German. You just can't talk to people with us. You have to actively make, you have to like, like sanewash the stuff that the administration is doing while you speak to normal people in your life just to not get written off yourself as crazy. Like, like, if you just do like baseline narration of like, oh, the, the kid lunatics who run these social media accounts are doing open white nationalist posting and here are six

examples, like, they will just think you're overtorking it because it just sounds like that if you're not paying attention. This is like a real problem we all have to deal with all the time. It goes back to the thing we were talking about right at the beginning. You know, how can you say like, oh, Trump's joking around about canceling the election and not sound crazy to people who have not been following along? So it's a, it's a difficult thing. Last thing I want to talk about the canceling the election thing is that the way the kidding stuff, oh, he's just kidding stuff works, is that the respectable people or the people want to be respectable say he's just kidding until he then says he's not at which point there they go silent

and then once he tries doing the thing they say well of course he should do that it's obvious we see this i mean for obviously we saw this with the 2020 election this was all of it it was like you know what's the the harm in humoring this last little bit right and then they all went in and were like yeah absolutely you ought to be ought to be doing it he uh of course he should try to to steal the election with Greenland. I don't know if you remember. When this first, when the Greenland adventure first started, it was all, ha, ha, look at you, libtards, getting all torched up. He knows just how to push your buttons. And now here we are. Even some of the lips felt that way, by the way. There you go again, herring after the crazy, the craziest things Donald Trump. Yeah, that, that sort of thing. But yes, I, I remember

pretty well. Thirteen months later. And there are a lot of people, not the whole of the Republican establishment, there are still Republicans who are like, well, obviously this can't happen. But a bunch of Republicans are like, well, Greenland is key to our national security. And I mean, it just does seem like we ought to have it. Of course, we should purchase it. You know, now like, we should purchase it

because it's key to an act. Believe me, if he drops SEAL Team 6 in Greenland, they're all going to be on board. Aren't they? Isn't that how this works? It'll be a spectrum, right? There will be the people who fall silent. and there will be the people who clap along like trained seals.

But the sum total will be like an information and like social media environment where all you see is open celebration, which then creates the next permission structure for everybody else to feel like open celebration is fine. And that just kind of, you know, torques the wrench one eighth of a turn forward. Invading Greenland would be more than an eighth of a turn. But yeah, but it's the same phenomenon. That's how this works. That's what I just want people to understand. So Donald Trump jokes about like, you know, there shouldn't even be elections.

But if and when he does attempt to cancel elections or attempt to invalidate the results of elections or attempt to not seat certain people who are the product of elections that he doesn't like, all the people who today say are just, oh, it's just kidding. They're all going to be on board and saying, absolutely, well, of course it's right that he does that. In fact, he must do that. because that's the world we live in. Hey guys, hit like, hit subscribe, follow the channel. It really helps us out because God knows you want more content like this. Andrew, thanks a lot. We'll see you guys again soon.